Reinventing Privacy: Moving from Individual to Group Privacy

For the last 130 years, privacy law and doctrine have focused on the individual level of privacy. From the "right to be alone" coined by Warren & Brandeis in 1890 to the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union, privacy is viewed as a matter for individuals with the development of tools, laws and policies focusing on individual empowerment. However, in the age of big data, new threats have emerged which are not properly addressed by individual mechanisms of privacy. Practices that collect and aggregate data to identify trends in human behaviour for modelling are invisible to individuals, and therefore not addressed by individualistic mechanisms. (Suh, & Metzger, 2022) Therefore, privacy violations in the era of Big Data and Al not only impact individuals but also impact all members of groups - a concept which will be further developed -, demonstrating the limitations of the individual right to privacy and the need to reinvent privacy taking into consideration group privacy.